Agree that this would be difficult at best. Anybody who thinks this is possible should buy a turkey at the grocery store, suspend the neck, and try slicing through it with a single blow through the air with the sharpest knife you can find.
Maybe we could send this to MythBusters and they’ll try it with a pig head. They did something like that to show that a cable suddenly released from high tension couldn’t slice a person (or dead pig, rather) in half.
An incident almost identical to that recounted in the OP refers to is told by Ambrose Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary. I don’t recall the entry, but I don’t think it’s “beheadings”, and I don’t have my copy here with me.
Obviously, the version told my Bierce is not meant to be taken seriously, and it goes farther than the story the OP tells – but it uses very nearly the same language.
The executioner, a swordsman of great skill, made a number of passes in great sweeping arcs, like a martial artist does in showing off, and on one such pass sliced through the air near the prisoner. Afterwards, the prisoner said he didn’t feel anything, and the executioner told him to press his nostrils together and blow. Everyone expected the prisoner’s head to fly off.
To everyone’s surprise – especially the executioner’s – it didn’t. "I apologize,
said the executioner to the king, "But in my passes the sword must have gone through my own neck, and this slowed it down so much that it did not pass through the prisoner. he then took off his own head and, kneeling down, presented it to the monarch.
It’s possible that gytalf2000 read this version and misremembered it. Or it could be that both he/she and Bierce read the same original (I certainly suspect that Bierce didn’t make up the whole story, but is riffing on an older “tall tale”), and that accounts for the similarity.
But I think both this version and any possible original are “tall tales”. Even experienced executioners with a heavy sword or axe were said to often take multiple blows to remove a head.
Historical European Martial Arts practioner checking in:
Could a swordsman behead someone with a sword in a single stroke? Absolutely. I’ve seen Longswords cut through a friggin’ deer carcass like it was butter. Note: it takes skill (something a French knight would likely have in spades).
Would the condemned be standing upright? Yes. I feel that kneeling (and not bowing) or standing would be preferred by the executioner, and I believe there are accounts of this (though I’ll have to dig them up). I can see how with an axe, kneeling and bowing would be the easiest way to assure a clean cut, but with a sword a standing target would be the most natural one.
Could the head remain attached to the body? Unlikely, but I don’t think it would be impossible. I would liken it to someone pulling the table cloth from under a table setting. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest. The cut would have to be very clean and I suppose it might have had to have landed between vertebrae.
Could the victim retain control over his body? As mentioned above, no way. But I can see how a slow tumble downward right after the cut might be perseived as something else by the spectators.
When standing/kneeling, CG of the head rests in front of the neck, doesn’t it? I don’t think it’d be easy for a severed head to rest there for any length of time without tumbling off, shaking or no.
This astonishes me, in light of the thickness of the body, not to mention the bone. Do you suppose there is a video of this kind of thing online somewhere?
